Austin Caesar - There's A Crack In Everything
As we are fully into the swing of spring, I decided to add different music flavours into the rotation. Usually, spring is associated with being quite sunny, especially here in England it's been quite windy and with briskness or chill in the air. This 2014 release from Austin Caesar captures the mental state you put into this time of year. Austin Caesars, There's A Crack In Everything has stuck with me since I first bought the record around Christmas in 2014. Released on Proibito that's some will know as Anthony Naples' label running from 2013 to 2017. There's A Crack In Everything stuck with me for so long. Its simplicity encapsulates the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, the acceptance of imperfection, and a let's just let things happen attitude. From the off, Caesar signifies this will be a different listening experience. Taking cues from the leftfield lo-fi house movement and ambient scene to curate an EP full of loops that sing in beautiful harmony.
Using sampled horns as the most prominent music in the track introduced these slightly percussive imperfections. 'Yep' builds with percussion and a beautiful chorus of rhythmic chattering filling the spaces between the horns. Delays on the horns ring above the rest of the building instrumentation while this vast reverb swells over the track. Caesar plays the whole arrangement like Lee 'scratch' Perry might in a dub recording studio. Each element is carefully brought in, and the effects are played with ever so slightly. The whole track is constantly built until it's filtered down to nothingness. The delays gain more feedback as the track floats off into the clouds.
'Slink' sounds much more ambient in presentation. Pianos are used, hard cut and looped much like a William Basinski piece. The melody is quite uplifting, considering the piano sounds so bleakly cold. The grand piano is gifted a sunny, daybreak aesthetic due to the heavy-handed saturation making it sound fresh and light. Beautiful layers start to stack on each other with claps, hi-hat percussion and a booming bass drum all added to the mix. Where slink deviates from 'Yet' is in the baseline it brings. The bass is sloppy in a nonchalant way. Nothing is quite on the beat, but it doesn't need to be because everything is slightly off. This is more sound experiment than dance track. Again, it sticks true to the loop aesthetic that the artist is going for. An abrupt ending emphasises this point, sounding like a needle being taken off the runoff groove of a record.
Austin Caesar encapsulates the best of both tracks in the final epic, '1 Year'. The 10-minute behemoth sets out to soundtrack the changing weather. As flowers, it becomes much more upbeat and joyful while it keeps that dusty lo-fi sound that is becoming synonymous with Probito. '1 Year' melds vocals into the Austin Caesar loops that transcend the icy atmosphere bringing warmth to the party. They would make sense to be Motown or soul record samples, recontextualised for the dance floor. With a solid drumbeat played throughout, '1 Year' is more functional than the others as we find '1 Year' in the realms of deep house. The frostiness of the piano contrasts with the almost celebratory horns. Increasingly engaging about this track is that you can change its intensity levels just by listening to different elements within it. For example, the vocals acquired jovial and warm, but the piano has a sombre vibe that's still quite cold.
Nine years later, this is still a perfect bridge between spring and summer for me. The coldness within the samples contrasted with the warmth of the production style. Extremely analogue, relying heavily on tape, record sampling and keeping it simple. It doesn't sound like a track with 1000 things going on, and it doesn't need to. About 5 things happening simultaneously give the track room to breathe, and Austin Caesars spent a lot of time trying to make it sound right.
Tracklist:
Yep
Slink
1 Year
Label: Proibito
Austin Caesar - There's A Crack In Everything
